Grievance Studies Hoax Exposed Corruption

In 2017 and 2018, American philosopher Peter Boghossian, British author Helen Pluckrose, and American mathematician James A. Lindsay submitted hoax papers to academic journals in gender, race, sexuality, and cultural studies. They said they wanted to expose what they viewed as intellectual corruption in “grievance studies,” arguing that some journals rewarded ideology over scholarship. One accepted paper rewrote part of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in feminist language, while other papers made deliberately absurd arguments. The project continued until 2018, when media attention and a public reveal exposed the hoax after several papers had already been accepted or published.

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